Whether you're looking for a few new drink options to warm up winter or a new book to give to the cocktail lover in your life, we have something for you. Three somethings, in fact:

"The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual: Secret Recipes and Barroom Tales From Two Belfast Boys who Conquered the Cocktail World"

Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, noted bartenders at The Dead Rabbit in New York, bring you drink recipes and stories to tell guests while you're mixing. The book chronicles the duo's journey from Northern Ireland to Manhattan;

drinks range from shareable punches to juleps, smashes, slings and toddies. Alongside the recipes, find the histories of the drinks — for example, that newspaper accounts between 1890 and 1962 stressed that "you must have a 'Green Swizzle'" while visiting Barbados.

An entire chapter on absinthe is an ode to the botanical spirit banned by some governments. It offers ideas for enjoying it in the way of the Swiss, Italians, Americans and French. The book ends with "invalid drinks," meaning those meant to help the ill, and, of course, a mean Irish Coffee.

"A Visual Guide to Drink"

Part coffee-table book with a modern cover modeling glassware, part look at how alcohol is made and consumed in different regions, this new book — from design studio Pop Chart Lab, created by Patrick Mulligan and Ben Gibson — emphasizes that alcohol is an art form.

It opens with "How Yeast Makes Alcohol," showing how yeast combines with grapes, or malted grain and hops, to make wine and beer.

Pages of maps and graphs range from a U.S. crop map to bar graphs showing alcohol consumption by country. The beer chapter goes through everything from the brewing process to the mergers and acquisitions involved in Anheuser-Busch InBev.

The evolution of beer vessels is shown in a way reminiscent of a museum's evolution of humans, with the bottles growing squatter and smaller. Wine, on the other hand, is organized by geography: French grape genealogy and German regulations get special attention, as does emigration, showing German grapes reaching California and Chile.

Perhaps most helpful for a cocktail party, a page of wine terminology offers helpful vocabulary to describe wine. You've never sounded smarter.

"Gin: The Manual"

If you want to zero in one spirit, this tome promises a thorough look at gin.

Dave Broom, the editor-in-chief of Whisky Magazine, first covered that topic in a similar "Manual." He says his love of gin began later in life, after growing up in Scotland where whisky was king and gin was a snooty English drink. A martini changed that.

Should you think the book is 200 pages of gin and tonic varieties, he dispels that assumption right away. Broom tasted 120 gins with four different preparations — yes, gin and tonic, but also gin with Sicilian lemonade, Negronis and martinis. Other options make appearances, like gin fizz and Martinez, but most of the book is devoted to how individual gins perform with those four main drinks.

He leads the reader through gin's history, from juniper as a miracle berry used for jaundice to the spirit's role during Prohibition. "Gin is nothing if not amenable," he writes.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 15, 2015, in the Life+Style section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Take cover from winter with 3 new cocktail books" —
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